With the development of the high-speed data communication technologies in recent years, large volumes of data such as video image data can be transmitted/received through an existing network to/from users using the network. However, transmission and reception of a large volume of data increases the traffic, allowing some of the network users to occupy the network resource. This situation makes it difficult for all the network users to benefit from the network resource. For this reason, the communications carriers, the service providers and the like limit the bandwidth of each transmission channel and thereby implement the operations for preventing the network resource from being occupied by some of the network users.
Meanwhile, with the development of the digital signal processing technologies, active studies have been performed on video compression technologies in order to enable more efficient data transmission using a transmission channel of a limited bandwidth. Motion-JPEE, Motion-JPEG2000, H264 and the like are known as the video compression technologies, wherein while each image frame data to be transmitted is compressed (coded), the compressed image frame data is decoded by a receiver, in order to display a video image on a monitor and the like.
However, a transmission error caused due to deteriorated communication quality and the like occurs frequently in a video image distribution service that uses the network. In such a case, block noise and the like occur in the video on the monitor regenerated by the receiver, causing obvious image deterioration. Patent Documents 1 to 3 described below disclose technologies that prevent the deterioration of image quality as much as possible when regenerating the video image data, by executing a re-transmission process for re-transmitting the video image data from the transmitter side to the receiver side and an error recovery process on video image data that is not received successfully, even when a transmission error occurs in the video image distribution service.